Operational costs for managing Information Technology (IT) over the last decade have been constantly increasing despite a significant decrease in infrastructure cost. The root cause of operation inefficiencies are often attributed to the complexity of IT infrastructure. Any enterprise of today maintains a large application portfolio, often grown historically, with many redundancies and decreasing visibility into the degree of interconnections between applications and hardware components.
The promise of Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) is to reduce the complexity of managing IT infrastructure by engaging a process-centric approach that allows for operational innovation and horizontal integration of the aforementioned vertical hierarchies.
However, one of the most challenging tasks in IT Service Management is to estimate the user (e.g., company or customer) impact and expectations for investments made to improve operational efficiency. There are several factors contributing to this problem.
First, each IT service in an IT organization is part of a larger value network. As today's IT service providers have very little visibility into their entire value network, it is hard to gauge the respective impact of singular process improvements.
Second, there is a lack of understanding on how to analyze the scope within which investments should be made. The service providers typically buy an enriched software package that most likely captures a much broader range of capabilities than actually required to improve the user problems. This large capability set blurs the impact horizon and makes it difficult to identify the key value to the user.